Taking Back the Web With Infura

Gitcoin is a place for freelance developers to work on Open Source projects in return for blockchain-based digital currencies. The platform regularly hosts virtual hackathons to bring developers from around the world together to work on themed blockchain ‘hacks’ and engage with some of the biggest companies in the industry.

In January, Gitcoin ran a two-week virtual hackathon dubbed Take Back the Web. The aim was to inspire developers to identify problems with the internet as we know it, and solve them by building blockchain-based solutions. At the end of the hackathon, every contributor had made something cool and the winners were awarded a bounty!

Hackers had 23 bounties to choose from across 9 Web3 companies. 448 hackers from around the world participated and worked in teams to submit 162 projects over the two weeks. Infura put up two bounties totalling $1000 in Eth. These bounties were created for developers with varying levels of experience - so it didn’t matter if you were new to blockchain development or were a seasoned Web3 pro, every developer had a shot at winning an Infura bounty.

The Infura IPFS Development Prize

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices. If this sounds foreign to you, don’t worry! The purpose of these projects is to make it easier for more developers to understand and build on decentralized protocols, so you should definitely read on and check out the projects below.

Infura offers an API that emulates working with a local IPFS node. To win this bounty, hackers had to use our API to create a dapp with a frontend that could be hosted on IPFS. The project had to be executed well, demonstrate high code quality and make the most novel use of our IPFS API.

And The Winner is…

@jmsofarelli! 🎉When you store (‘pin’) content on IPFS, that content becomes publicly viewable by anyone who knows the hash of that content. But some applications may need to regulate access to certain types of IPFS content in order to function. @jmsofarelli was awarded the IPFS Development Prize by enabling creators to pin their content to IPFS, sign and verify using uPort ID and register each item’s hash on the Ethereum network. By using Ethereum contracts to register these hashes and regulate access to them, this project helps solve the viewability problem.

Special Mentions

While there can only be one winner, we wanted to give a shout out to two great submissions that were also superb uses of the Infura IPFS API:  

• 📣IPFS-FRBR by @cervoneluca is a  package to handle versioning on IPFS by means of FRBR categorization and Ethereum ERC721 contracts. It offers a solution for the always troublesome problem of software versioning, and combines IPFS storage with Ethereum ERC-721 NFT identifiers.
• 📣WalletConnect is an interoperability standard for interaction with Ethereum wallets. @Abhimanyu121 created a WalletConnect integration for event management by combining smart contracts for event management with IPFS as the storage destination for a wallet’s tickets. This solution enables developers to store static assets in IPFS, which can always be accessed by a hash, removing the risk of having to rely on a central server.

Infura Ethereum API Optimization Prize

Each Ethereum network call costs money and can be vulnerable to network clogging. This prize challenged advanced developers to create tools for optimizing Ethereum API calls: either by reducing the number of eth_calls that a dapp makes, or by reducing the cost. Projects had to showcase improvements in dapp efficiency and hackers were encouraged to be as creative as possible.

And The Winner is…

@Destiner! 🎉The Ethereum network can become congested with transactions, making the network slower and more expensive to use. Applications can help alleviate congestion and increase their own performance by optimizing the way they request data from the network. One way to do this is through better smart contract design and adopting Solidity best practices. Another way is to batch static read calls together. We awarded this prize to @Destiner for their ethcall Javascript library. This library can be imported to allow batching transactions, thereby helping more developers optimize their API usage and improve the efficiency of their dapps.

Thank you to everyone who participated! Please check out the linked Github repositories and give ‘em a star. You can register for more Infura bounties at https://gitcoin.co/infura or subscribe to our newsletter to stay-up-to date.

Ready to Build?

If you and your fellow developers are eager to start building and want quick, reliable access to Ethereum and IPFS, check out this guide and get started for free with Infura: https://blog.infura.io/getting-started-with-infura-28e41844cc89/. You can also access excellent resources to help you learn dapp development by checking out Kauri’s recently released guide, or through the ConsenSys developer portal.

See you at the next hackathon! Infura will have folks attending EthDenver, EthLondon and EthCC so be sure to swing by the ConsenSys booth to meet the team and drop your feature requests.